Paul's Posts

I drive an electric car yet I still step on the gas. I play music through modern transducers that cling to their original monicker from the 1800s: a loud speaker.... Read more...

The curse of new

No sooner do I get a new ache or pain than my mind gravitates to the worst possible scenario. "No doubt it's cancer." When a new product has a hiccup... Read more...

Weird to wonderful

Bringing new ideas, concepts, and radical change to an established way of doing things requires great effort—moving from weird to wonderful. Imagine just a few of the major shifts within... Read more...

Do opinions matter?

Opinions. We've all got them and most of us are eager to share. Do opinions matter? I suppose the answer is where in the pecking order they come from. The... Read more...

Big little changes

I find it fascinating to watch myself getting older. Day by day nothing seems to change, yet somehow the mirror doesn't reflect the picture of a younger me I harbor... Read more...

Functional vs. aesthetic

One of the challenges facing any designer or engineer is the quandary of form vs. function. On the one hand, function is a requisite for any sensible design. If it... Read more...

Building beasts

Building speakers is way different than electronics. For one thing, loudspeakers can be handcrafted and designed from scratch, where electronics require cobbling together off-the-shelf parts. No one in our industry... Read more...

In search of miracles

I am constantly on the hunt for miracles. I don't want just improvements or brighter polish when it comes to my audio system. No, in fact, it's miracles I am... Read more...

Shiver me timbers

Perhaps the greatest compliment a piece of audio gear can get is a shiver down a spine—exactly what Calord experienced on his first listen to the new Steller Phono Preamplifier.... Read more...

Converts

One of the joys we share is the moment of the great awakening: when a music lover decides it's no longer acceptable to sully music's beauty with poor quality reproduction.... Read more...

Setting levels

Where we set our system-level can make a tremendous amount of difference. One of the problems I often see in digital audio is people hell-bent on setting the volume level... Read more...

Audiophile wisdom

Part of knowing our HiFi Family so well is understanding what I like to think of as Audiophile Wisdom, the collective agreement of what we believe. For example, audiophiles pretty... Read more...

Generalizations

We make sense of a complicated world by neatly organizing products, ideas, and concepts into tidy little boxes. Unfortunately, there are consequences to generalizing because we ignore edge cases. It... Read more...

Reaching consensus

Is it possible to reach consensus among dissenting views? I suspect it's pretty rare. I think one of the classic problems with communication is how we present differing viewpoints as... Read more...

Why work at training?

When I first got involved in high-end audio I was not a good listener. Sure, I loved music and always have, but I struggled with discerning small differences in the... Read more...

Uncovering gems

"There's buried treasure in them thar speakers! I feels it in me bones." Sometimes I do feel like a pirate in search of buried treasure when I go to listen.... Read more...

When measurements take a backseat

As engineers, we always start a new design with the best of intentions. We're hell-bent on making sure our new creations perform to their best. One of the ways we do that is by measurement which always precedes listening. When PS Audio's analog engineer Daren Myers set out to design the new Stellar Phono Preamplifier his first stop was the measurement suite in PS Audio's lab. "Extremely low distortion? Check. Vanishingly low noise? Check." Then, it's on to the music room to see how all that fine measuring equipment sounds.... Read more...

Setting a high bar

We work so hard achieving sonic purity that it's easy to forget just how flawed some of our tools are. Microphones and loudspeakers, for example, are so far away from... Read more...

The art of procrastination

I don't know anyone as good at procrastination as I am. I'll spend countless hours checking, organizing, thinking, preparing, and…well…procrastinating until I finally make the commitment. Or not. Mostly not.... Read more...

Homebrew

Most of us don't brew our own beer because it's easier and probably tastier to let the experts do it for us. In that same vein, we rarely design our... Read more...

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